ease does not equal happiness

I go to my Grandma's most Sunday nights and I enjoy spending the evening with her. Tonight I just happened to go to her house late and arrived after everyone had left. I had the most amazing conversation with her. We talked a lot about what life was like when she was growing up on a farm in southern Utah and raising her own children in the military. She didn't get a radio until she was a teenager or a bathroom in her house. I asked her what they did in the evening after all the daily chores were done. She talked about making huge bonfires in the road and roasting potatoes or pine nuts and playing run sheep run. She also talked about her mother playing the piano and singing and eating apples. She shared that my grandfather's father was a great storyteller.
I guess it use to be that you couldn't buy yeast in the store so if your "yeast start" went flat you had to go to your neighbors and get a start off of them. When you needed something from the store you went and gathered a few eggs and took them to the store to get what you needed. Her father belonged to a beef co-op where they all killed a cow once per week and all got a different cut each week. She talked about how they all looked out for each other's kids because whatever they were up to, your kids were too.

When I expressed that I grew up in the wrong time she stated that there is no way I would want to go back to that time. There was no hot water, they had to heat everything up on a coal or wood burning stove. It took all day to cook and clean and they had an outhouse. My response was that ease doesn't equal happiness. Although her mother had so much to do she also spent time with her neighbors EVERYDAY! We live in a day when people don't know each other. We don't know our neighbors and our entertainment is all on TV with people we don't know. We don't laugh the way we use to and we don't take care of each other. In fact I think people are more depressed because of the easiness of our lives. Well, really because the easiness separates us from others. We don't know each other anymore. If we have a social life at all it is digital. I saw on the news the other night that PRESCHOOLERS are having higher rates of depression. Our digital lives leave us alone.

Because of the easiness of our lives we are so ungrateful and expect so much. We just don't count our blessings as much as we use to. We want to eat out all the time and complain when we have to clean our houses with our store bought cleaning supplies and microfiber cloth and the magic eraser (I do love the magic eraser!). We are upset when we have to change diapers that we can just throw away in the garbage and have some man come and take it away once a week. I guess my point is that our lives are easy and yet we are some of the unhappiest loneliest, and confused people in all of history. But what do we do? How do we change it?